Why does porn got to hurt so bad?

A couple days ago I chased a link over to unablogger and found myself
unexpectedly confronted by pictures of naked women. This picture, in
particular. And I noticed something unusual -- which was that I liked
it.

Don't get me wrong, here. I'm a functioning heterosexual male; I
enjoy looking at naked women. It's most pictures of naked
women I can't stand. I've found by experience that most of the vast
amounts of pornography available on the Internet leave me feeling more
repelled than aroused. And not out of puritanism either; I have no
intrinsic moral objection to porn, and I judge that the
consequentialist arguments against it don't stand the reality
test.

No, the truth is that I find most porn subtly and deeply ugly.
Unablogger's picture (which happens to be of a Czech model named
Veronika Zemanova) was a sufficiently glaring exception that it
stimulated me to think seriously about why.

It was immediately clear to me that Ms. Zemanova's physique was not
the primary reason this photograph struck me as an exception.
Ms. Zemanova unquestionably has a very shapely and appealing body and
a pretty face. However, I have seen many photographs of women with
equally lovely bodies and equally pretty faces that I nevertheless
found ugly and unstimulating as entire compositions, without being
completely clear about why.

My initial reaction was reinforced when I searched for other images
of Ms. Zemanova and discovered ugly genericporn. The
difference, clearly, was not in Ms. Zemanova's body but in way the
attitude and setting -- one might say the implied narrative -- of her
pictures differed. Time for some analysis...

Like any good scientist, I proceeded to do some research. I surfed
to a well-known porn index
site and random-sampled the content, sticking to pictures of
single unclad women in order to control some obvious variables. Using
my own hypothalamus as a calibration instrument, I graded the samples
into "excellent" (I want to keep a copy) "good" (pleasant to look at)
"mediocre" (mechanically arousing but unpleasant) and "bad" (just
plain unpleasant). There were very, very few "excellents", and almost
none of the caliber of Unablogger's image of Ms. Zemanova.

After the first grading pass, I re-sorted the images in an attempt
to compensate for the presence of particular physical features that
I know are powerful sexual releasers for me (red hair is an example).
I did this because, to the extent possible, I wanted to try to separate
my autonomic arousal reaction to the images from my esthetic and
psychological reaction. So I downgraded images in which the women
had obvious, powerful releaser traits for me.

Now, this was hardly a controlled experiment. And it's just me.
But once I corrected for my autonomic biases, a clear pattern emerged,
especially in the "bad" category. Many images contained elements that
were, at least to me, anti-arousing. Over-styled hair -- especially
over-styled blonde hair. Fake pearls. Strappy high heels
being worn by otherwise naked women. Feather boas and tacky hooker
lingerie. Bloated silicone breasts. Excessive makeup; excessive
makeup was, in fact a rule even in most otherwise uncompromised
images.

The pattern was not surprising; I had had some insight about this
before without thinking it through completely. Bad porn is full of
the fetish signifiers of sexual allure, to the point where they crowd
out the reality of sexual allure. Porn models often look
more like women trying desperately hard to be sexy than they look like
sexy women. There is a wrongness there.

Contrast this picture of
a model named India Allen with Ms. Zemanova's picture. I have no
doubt that Ms. Allen is quite a fetching young woman; indeed, I chose
her image because on the physical-traits level she can compete with Ms.
Zemanova quite handily. But this image is not good porn; it is crowded
with elements that distract one from Ms. India's native sexiness. The
silly carousel horse. The glare spot behind her left hip. The teddy
artfully half-removed despite the fact that she is obviously
not planning to strip for sex in the immediate future.

I can't speak for other men, but my gut reaction is "What is all
this bullshit?" Where the Unablogger photo of Ms. Zemanova offers us
a narrative about sex ("I'm taking my clothes off because I want to
have sex with the person I'm looking at -- yes, that would be
you.") Ms. Allen's offers us a narrative about being sexy --
looking alluring in a fantasy context that makes actual sex quite
unlikely. How many of us, after all, have ever gotten laid anywhere
near a carousel horse?

And typical porn is actually far worse than this. Mostly the
models have a vacant-eyed, stunned look to them. They frequently
contort themselves into bizarre positions that would make sex
impossible and aren't really plausible as a stage of foreplay either.
Or they sprawl, surrounded by fetish objects, passively waiting to be
fucked. They don't smile; their faces are either mindlessly slack
or locked in a rictus of simulated passion as obviously fake as
a three-dollar bill.

As I looked at more bad-porn images, I found myself waking up to a
deep bewilderment. How could these pictures arouse anyone who was
actually paying attention to them? Why is there a market
for this crap?

When I remember the good sex I've had, or imagine the good sex I
might have, my head is not populated by vacant-eyed women surrounded
by fetish objects and passively waiting to be fucked. No; my
fantasies, and my experience, is of women who are intelligent
horny animals like me; live-eyed, smiling, fully awake and quite ready
to seize the initiative if I drop it, thank you. For real women, the
meaning of the sex is the sex, not the ooh-look-I'm-hot
posing that goes before it. The Unablogger image of Ms. Zemanova looks
like she has a real woman's attitude; most of her competitors'
pictures (and indeed most of her own) don't.

Bad porn is superficially sexual in a way as stylized as Kabuki
theater, but deeply anti-erotic. To be aroused by it, you have to be
reading the code that tells you are supposed to be aroused -- the
artificial boobs, the decorticated stares, the garter belts. If you
delete or mask out that code, no actual sexual charge remains -- there
is nothing left that connects your desire to the subject of the
picture.

Mediocre porn, though mechanically arousing enough to facilitate
masturbation by someone with a case of serious hormonal back-pressure,
has only the subject's body parts and the viewer's autonomic response
going for it. For very few men is it plausible to have sex with a
lipstick-and-eyeshadow-wearing starlet/bimbo type with 40DD breasts
who's somehow had her skin lacquered to a gloss that resembles
model-airplane dope and just happens to be bent over a motorcycle
while stark naked. Sorry, no sale; a real woman would at least have
her hair a bit mussed.

The fetishistic perfection of such scenes actually puts
distance between the subject and the viewer's desire.
It removes the subject from any real world in which one might
meet her and actually take her to bed. Autonomic response to the
picture itself is the limit of the possible.

Good porn, by contrast, conveys a sense of plausibility. You
believe the women in it exist. You can imagine meeting them. You can
imagine liking one of them, having her like you, and the two of you
sliding off somewhere for a mutually happy fuck. Being aroused by
such a picture makes emotional sense; you don't have to either fight
or ignore any sense that the subject is an inaccessible fantasy.

The contrast is perfectly evident in two pictures of Ms. Zemonova.
In this one,
she looks like an unusually sexy but normal young woman in the act of
removing her panties while she looks at the viewer. The narrative is
clear; she is stripping for action, and you are the fortunate object
of her desire. Women do this sort of thing. If you are not a virgin,
you've probably seen it happen, though perhaps never with a partner
quite as exuberantly mammalian as Ms. Zemanova. This is a plausible
scenario.

In this
picture, by contrast, Ms. Zemanova is a heavily cosmeticized,
unsettlingly glossy womanoid-thing in an unlikely position,
masturbating herself and gazing off into space over your right
shoulder. You are not involved. Nothing like this would be even
remotely plausible in your bathroom -- if only because sensible women
masturbate in their bedrooms, where they can collapse onto something
more comfortable than a tile floor when they orgasm. This picture is
not presenting a plausible scenario, unless you are the sort of wealthy
British rock star who builds huge custom bathrooms in which to boff
acquiescent supermodels.

This image makes an ironic example of good porn because it
demonstrates that the apparent lack of artifice in good porn can be just as
misleading as the fetish objects of bad porn. This innocent-looking
girl-next-door posing as though she's giving her boyfriend a private
thrill is actually the star character of a large and very raunchy
German porn site. While one can hope she has nevertheless remained as
sweet-natured and unjaded as she looks, betting money on this
possibility would be imprudent at best.

Nor, despite the partial clothedness of my two examples, am I
arguing that good porn has to be soft-core, either. This
woman is leaving little to the imagination. But she has a nice
smile -- something which, in a medium supposedly devoted to pleasure,
is astonishingly rare. I searched through many hundreds of images and
found almost none that combined full nudity with a simple human
smile. Symbolically, the first one I found had disappeared by the
following day, and I won't lay odds that the link above will stay
good.

Very well, the facts are in hand; as many of them as I'm likely to
get, anyway -- I've had as much exposure to bad porn as I can
tolerate. Let's return to the central question. Why does pornography
have to hurt so bad? Why is there so much bad porn out there and so
little good stuff?

At one level the answer is fairly obvious. Like the purveyors of
any other commodity, the people who produce porn have to respond to
demand. Indeed, because production is cheap and the sales cycle is
short, market selection can be expected to drive production to match
demand very rapidly. There is no evidence of massive market-rigging,
and good porn is no more expensive to produce than bad porn -- in
fact, it may be less expensive (the same models can be used
for good and bad, and the good stuff needs less in the way of
elaborate props). Therefore, if most porn is bad, it's because most
porn consumers want it to be bad.

Let's unpack that. The trash percentage of porn is so high that,
unless the producers are collectively insane, most consumers must
actually want images of women who are doing the bad-porn
thing. That most porn consumers actually like the trash is further
suggested by the tacky, gaudy, crude design of almost all porn
websites. They scream, they leer, they spew misspellings and
degrading language at high volume. The sheer aggressive ugliness is
far too consistent to be the result of incompetence.

So the real question is this: why do most porn consumers seek
trash? Why do they buy the fetish objects, the implausable poses, the
unobtainable women? Why welcome such an anti-erotic distance between
their sexual fantasies and their sexual reality?

We can certainly imagine how it might be different. Why don't
porn consumers choose images they might plausibly act out, with
partners rather sexier than the ones they have but still
attainable? In fact some do; most porn sites have an `amateurs'
category -- but it's marketed like a minority taste along with
pictures of older women and fat women.

I am forced to the unhappy conclusion that plausibility is exactly
what most porn consumers don't want. That somehow they feel better
when their fantasies are safely distant from reality. All the
possible reasons I can imagine for this are very sad.

One reason could be simple old-fashioned sexual guilt. If you
believe sex is sinful and desire is dirty, if you have that old
madonna/whore complex, than you may be more comfortable thinking
of porn models as whores. You may indeed, be so conditioned to
associate sex with sin that you can't get it off without feeling
wicked first.

A more plausible construction for most potential porn consumers
today is that they have issues about female power. Men who get lots
of attention from attractive three-dimensional women are not likely to
be buying porn-site subscriptions. Therefore, we can safely assume
that the consumers who define demand patterns for porn producers
generally feel that their sex life is hemmed in by female choices and
the female power to refuse. Defining the objects of their desire as
"cum-sucking sluts", to be used but not related to any emotional way,
is a kind of equalizing move in the sexual-power game.

This theory differs sharply from conventional feminist critiques pf
porn, in which porn seen as a ratification of existing power
relationships that privilege males. The difference is testable. If
the conventional theory is correct, porn should be becoming more and
more irrelevant as women become more independent -- or, at least,
assume the nostalgic character of references to a golden age of male
privilege that has already passed.

On the other hand, if bad porn is a compensation for male feelings
of powerlessness, we should expect it to become steadily tackier,
uglier, more strident, and more popular in direct proportion to the
degree that female power in the real world increases.

I think it's pretty clear which of those worlds we are living in.
The gloomy conclusion is that porn is likely to get worse before it
gets better. If it ever does.

UPDATE: Have since corresponded with "German Lucy",
the woman whose picture I described as an ironic example of
good porn. It's nice when cynicism turns out to be a mistake;
she really is like that.

posted by Eric at 5:22 PM

A New Germ Theory:

I don't normally post links here, but
this article is too good to miss. It seems there is a powerful
argument that many diseases and disorders we are accustomed to
thinking of as genetic or multi-factorial may in fact be the result
of infectious pathogens. This includes heart disease, various
forms of cancer, schizoprenia, and (sorry, Andrew) homosexuality.

posted by Eric at 7:22 AM

Wednesday, June 05, 2002

Who's a warblogger? Blogotypology considered:

My good buddy Doc Searls
says I'm a warblogger, not a techblogger. Truth is I've never
thought of myself either way. I had only the vaguest notion what
a `warblogger' is until I followed his links to the definitional
discussion. I write stuff related to 9/11 because it's one of
the definining events of our day, but I didn't start blogging
particularly because I wanted to comment on the war. Y'all
may have noticed that I write about sex and guns a lot. Nothing about witchcraft yet, but give it time... :-)

The blogotypological distinction that makes the most
sense to me is "thinker" vs. "linker". I know which of those
camps I'm in. I'm a thinker, an essayist. I'd rather write about
my original thinking than reflect or index other peoples' words.
VodkaPundit was right on when he compared me to Steve Den Beste over at U.S.S. Clueless. Glenn Reynolds is, of course, the king of the linkers (though
he goes into thinker mode off-blog).

I'd actually say there's a
third setting on this switch; "diarist", someone who blogs
essentially as a public journal. Like Den Beste, I'm not a diarist; you wouldn't find ramblings about my beagle or my infant daughter here even if I had either.
My personal life appears in this blog only insofar as it's the
frame in which my ideas happen. I can imagine writing personal journalism, but it's not my default style.
Asparagirl, on
the other hand, is a good paradigmatic example of a diarist; her ideas are embedded in a narrative of her life.

Of course, people do mix modes. James Lileks is
a diarist/thinker, or thinker/diarist, and
Andrew Sullivan
oscillates among all three modes in a (dare I say it?)
gaily promiscuous fashion. But most bloggers seem to
have a base style that's one of these three, from which they
may make occasional excursions but to which they
inevitably return.

As Doc points out, I'm not a techblogger either. Technology
evangelism is what I do off-blog; Armed and
Dangerous is for the writing that doesn't fit that box, just
as a lot of other bloggers treat the medium as an outlet for
whatever is not their day job. Maybe that's another
distinction we need; `problogger' (someone like Jonah Goldberg
whose blogging is a seamless extension of his day job) versus `playblogger' (someone who blogs to let off steam that their day-job channels don't have a good vent for).

While the best I can say about the term `warblogger' is that
it's not completely useless, `techblogger' seems to me to be a
category that's likely to survive as the medium matures. So
does the thinker/linker/diarist distinction, and the playblogger/problogger flag bit.

I'll end with the obligatory abjurgation not to take any such
terminology too seriously. We're all writers, a prickly bunch,
and we're all to some degree category-busters by nature or
we wouldn't be here in the infancy of a new medium at all. Still...I suspect that more definite blogotypes will emerge as people explore the space of available styles and discover which ones
are most effective at communication.

posted by Eric at 5:14 PM

I am an
insignificant insect, it seems. I suppose I could hardly
expect anything else, given I have only been blogging for three weeks...

posted by Eric at 5:29 AM

Monday, June 03, 2002

We are all Jews now:

This afternoon I read a hilarious quote from a woman calling herself "shell" who had left a
comment on Dawn Olsen's weblog (link via InstaPundit and Tim Blair). She wrote:

"In a post 9-11 world, I feel it's my duty as a woman to wear clingier
clothing, flirt more outrageously, have more orgasms, and get on top
more often. In short, anything that's taboo to the islamofascists."

Boo-yah, sister! This struck me as a wonderful example of what
computer hackers and science-fiction fans call a `ha ha only serious',
which is just the the opposite of a `ha ha only kidding'. It's a
wonderfully multi-leveled utterance.

Generally when people start out with "As an X, I feel it's my duty"
one expects the followthrough to be some ennobling exhortation to
self-sacrifice and a stiff upper lip. The sheer cheekiness of
following instead with "gonna get laid more" is wonderful -- I can
imagine the sister, with a gleam in her eye and a curl of her lip,
daring anybody to call her on it, and daring anybody not to
notice that she is one hot chick who knows exactly how to use what
she's got.

An idiot, or a conservative of the ramrod-up-the-ass school, would
stop there, take her rhetorical flip-the-bird at islamofascists as no
more than an excuse for narcissism-tinged self-display or a thin bit
of patter, and perhaps splutter with jowly indignation. Me, I got
respect for this sister. I think she meant every word she said and
was being wicked smart.

The true mindfucking beauty of this quote only becomes apparent
when you hold both meanings (the sexual self-display and the the
anti-islamofascist flip-the-bird) in your mind at once, and allow each
to play off the other in a spirit of intentional irony. Our sister
has uttered the perfect sexual battle cry for the islamofascists'
occidentalist
nightmare -- and I think she knows it.

Since 9/11 it has become easier to notice that Islamic fear and
hatred of the West (and of America as its political and cultural
hyperpower) is rooted in a hostility to all the freedoms and
self-indulgences of urban western civilization -- commerce, mixed
populations, artistic freedom, sexual license, scientific pursuits,
leisure, personal safety, wealth. Indeed, one of the circumstances
that justifies the term "islamofascism" is that this catalog of
resentments is exactly that of classical fascism. And the icon of
subversive modernity, to all fascists everywhere, has been the Jew --
rootless, cosmopolitan, urbane, commercial, and (in anti-Semitic
propaganda) sexual seducer of the pure.

The two perceptive commentators linked above have written "Mao Zedong,
Pol Pot, Hitler, Japanese agrarian fascists, and of course Islamists
all extolled the simple life of the pious peasant, pure at heart,
uncorrupted by city pleasures, used to hard work and self-denial, tied
to the soil, and obedient to authority. Behind the idyll of rural
simplicity lies the desire to control masses of people, but also an
old religious rage, which goes back at least as far as the ancient
superpower Babylon."

By saying "fuck me", the sister is saying a big "fuck you" to all
that. She is choosing to embody the whore of Babylon for reasons that
mingle her own desire with deliberate defiance of the bearded
patriarchs and their stormtroopers. She is acting out the culture war
as sexual politics. She is not merely a hedonist or a rebel (though
either would be bad enough in islamofascist eyes) but an ultimately enraging combination of
the two, conscious blasphemy against the Big Daddy God written with the body under those clinging
clothes.

Or, as our commentators put it: "To all those who see military discipline, self-sacrifice,
austerity, and worship of the Leader as the highest social ideals, the power of female sexuality
will be seen as a dire threat." You go, sister! Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

In the fevered mind of any islamofascist, the sister is certainly
urban and probably Jewish. In fact, we are all Jews now, every one of
us in the West. This is what lies behind the standard-issue
Arab-world mutterings about U.S. policy being controlled by Jews and
Israelis, and the tremendous wave of pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli
solidarity in the U.S. after 9/11. The alliance both we and the
Islamists are sensing is more than geopolitical; it's founded in
everybody's gut-level understanding that rage against the Jews and
rage against modernity have become effectively synonymous.

Yes, we're all Jews now, even blue-eyed Germano-Celtic goyim like
me. We are going to be everything the islamofascists fear and hate,
and we're going to glory in it. We're going to embody all the worst
nightmares of those butt-ignorant ragheads in Al-Qaeda. We're going to
kill them, we're going to subvert their children with MTV, and we're
going to teach their women to wear clingy clothing and say "fuck me"
and "fuck you" to men whenever they damn well feel like it.

And, sister? Here's my ha ha only serious, offered in the
same spirit as yours. You are a warrior. I salute you. And if you
want to commit exactly the kind of scandalous, adulterous, hedonistic,
casual sex best calculated to drive fascists and patriarchs up a wall
sometime, I'm your guy. You can be on top.